Friday June 28, 2002:
Rilla's mother's name was Sarah Melinda Griswold. This explains why every year we went to the Griswold reunion in Sarnia or Woodstock or some small town or other in Southern Ontario. What I remember about the Griswold reunions was having to compete in the races. They did it by age so I had to race my cousin Chuck, just the two of us, for every race (one legged or carrying a spoon, etc.). I was always faster than Chuck (Clapp) even though he was a year older. The whole race thing was very uncomfortable. I didn't want to lose the races, but I hated beating Chuck; I was always afraid he was feeling bad about it.
We stopped going to the Griswold reunions after a while; probably after Rilla died. My dad was eating Chicken Pot Pie one reunion and there were feathers in the pie. He had this thing about the farmers in the family. He wasn't going to chance having to choke down more feathers; whatever, we stopped going to the reunions.
I do have some great memories of trips to Canada. The smell of cow manure and new mowed hay. The old rusting tractors. The cows coming in to milk (all by themselves) after a day in the pasture. Milk right out of the cow, real rich and thick. One memory is of a foggy morning. I am alone on a dirt drive, an old rusted tractor is parked off to the side (I probably climbed on it). A barbed wire fence is somewhere in the scene, and an old barn is there, with stalls for the cows, milk buckets against the wall. And the smell of the barn is powerful all around the farm. That might have been Ben's place, Mose's brother, or it might have been one of Rilla's brothers (there were eight kids in her family; actually it was different places, but one place was Rilla's sister's Rose (Rockett)). There was also this other woman, younger than Rilla, who looked and acted a lot like my grandmother, someone I just intuitively liked (Glenna).
Rilla had a lazy eye that was always off center. As an eye doctor I think I understood where my own eye problems (high myopia) came from. I think the genetics skipped a generation (so I was told) so my mother and her siblings weren't affected, but I was. Instead of getting strabismus however, I got the high myopia (which my contact lenses have taken care of quite well; now Tyler has it).
That's enough for tonight. I'll tell a little of the detective story each night or as time permits. One more thing though. When I asked, as a young man, what my heritage was, I was told that I was English, Dutch, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish. I can verify the English part, having traced the ancestry of the male Baldwin line back to Buckinghamshire in England. The rest of the story is a mystery that I intend to unravel as the days unfold.
Sunday July 7, 2002:
Here is what I know about The Griswold line:
Harvey B. Griswold married Mary Hainer
George Griswold married Hannah Buckrell
(James and Meriah Buckrell came to Canada in 1855 from Bristol England)
2. Surname Symbols
3. E-mail Jessie
4. George's parents
5. Marriage, birth, death etc. for all members